Guest Post by Morbo
Through the grapevine here in the nation’s capital, I learned that the always-repulsive William Bennett spoke at the Religious Right’s “Values Voter Summit” last weekend, where he endorsed waterboarding our enemies.
You remember Bill Bennett, right? As education secretary under Ronald Reagan, he achieved, well, nothing — except finding new ways to siphon tax money away from public schools and into the coffers of parochial ones. As “drug czar” under Bush I, he achieved, well, nothing — except managing to kick his own smoking habit with the help of nicotine gum.
Since then, Bennett has apparently been lounging about consuming cases of Hostess Ho-Ho’s, as he has ballooned to Jabba the Hut-like proportions. When he’s not hanging out in casinos, Bennett manages to crank out the occasional book reminding us what ill-educated, un-virtuous scumbags we are. For this he is a national treasure to the Religious Right.
Yes, Bill Bennett thinks he’s better than you. Bill Bennett believes that he, by virtue of his conservative Roman Catholic faith, hews to a superior ethic that you, with your puny liberal Christianity, Reform Judaism, secular humanism or whatever, can never aspire to.
And Bill Bennett says torture is okey-dokey with him. “If waterboarding will save American lives, then I’m for waterboarding,” he told the 1,700 attendees.
How did these good Christians respond? They stood up and cheered.
I suppose one could argue that Bennett tried to leave himself some wiggle room: He’s only for waterboarding if it will save American lives. But the trick is, we can never be sure it will save American lives when we use it, as we cannot see into the future.
When the government engages in waterboarding, in your name, with your tax dollars having bought said board and water, it hopes to extract information that, we’re told, will be used for good: to save lives. But, as professional interrogators have repeatedly pointed out to no avail, the person who is strapped to the inclined board with his feet raised above his head, with a cloth gag in his mouth and with water poured over him, will pretty much confess to anything to make it stop. The information given may be completely fabricated and thus of no use and save no lives.
So, Bill Bennett is not for waterboarding “if it will save lives.” Bill Bennett is just for plain old waterboarding. Bill Bennett endorses torture. Bill Bennett does this even though the god/man he extols was himself tortured (to no avail).
In 1985, I was fortunate enough to hear Chilean exile Ariel Dorfman speak at the university I was then attending. I was too clueless to know who he was, but I do recall that his words moved me. His words moved me again recently. Dorfman wrote in The Washington Post:
Can’t the United States see that when we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and the perpetrator who are corrupted, not only the “intelligence” that is contaminated, but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, everyone who consented tacitly to that outrage so they could sleep a little safer at night, all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness?
Are we so morally sick, so deaf and dumb and blind, that we do not understand this? Are we so fearful, so in love with our own security and steeped in our own pain, that we are really willing to let people be tortured in the name of America?
Sadly, many of us are that sick. And some who are among the sickest claim to speak as leaders of a movement that extols “virtues” and “values.” They claim to occupy the moral high ground.
The truth is more mundane: Bennett and his crowd of pseudo-Christians, by endorsing torture, by cheering calls for it, are so far away from the moral high ground that they couldn’t see it with an astronomer’s telescope.
I have a reminder for Mr. Virtues: There is an old ethical principle so commonsensical and basic that is shared by virtually every religious and philosophical system in the world. It is found in the Old Testament in the Book of Leviticus, and in the New Testament, no less a person that Jesus Christ himself espoused it. You might want to commit it to memory. It goes something like this: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.